[2024-11] Matt (Host)

Hi, I'm Matt Dempster and we've been here with Jeonghyun here for 12 weeks now over nearly the end, overtime with him and it's just been a fantastic 12 weeks getting to know him, learning more about his culture and where he grew up and how he lives and his family and sharing ours as well with them. We've done a lot of fun things with them the last 12 weeks. We've taken him out, see a bunch of beautiful spots of the mountains and we've had a great time doing that. He's had never seen elk before and has never seen a lot of animals we had, so it was fun to show things for the first time. He was just really excited about it.

As a family, I found like it's just a really bonding time for our family. We got bringing them into our family. He just quickly became part and loves hanging with our kids and they love hanging with him and just had a really fun time with him.

I think another great thing has been bringing Jeonghyun to our church and having to experience our church here in Canada. It's definitely a little bit different from his upbringing in Korea, but it's nice to sort of make sure our experience here with him and also him sharing kind of how he goes to church and how he loves God back Home. So it's been great to see him kind of stretch.

And yeah, just with him learning English, he learned very quickly. He was very responsive to us teaching him English and I picked up English very quickly.

That's been an awesome, awesome time with him.

The support that the homestay program has given us has been fantastic, always on handy if we need to have any questions or any concerns, we can give them a quick call or e-mail and they are very quick to respond and get back to us. And it's just been a awesome time. So it's been a great program and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to do it.

February 7, 2025